Anneke Eussen

With drawing and sculpture as instruments, the Dutch artist Anneke Eussen creates and explores her own visual universe. In her exhibition at Bildmuseet, the Museum of Visual Arts, which is her first major solo exhibition, the focus is on drawing. The images are large, often with elements of series or repetition, produced mostly in pencil and colour pencil, with strong suggestive motifs and moods.

Generally, a teenage culture seems to be a recurring frame of reference in Anneke Eussen’s work. The human figures that populate her images are neither children nor adults, and often also indeterminable in terms of gender. They have features of comic books, Manga aesthetics, goth. At the same time, they are timeless and have few cultural references. Sensual, strong presence, but also protectionless, exposed, with sudden undertones of vulnerability and cold. Innocence can be corrupted in a quick moment. Sometimes the expression is even more explicit, like the full-body jersey-covered figure in the Zentai – pose and play or violation series. It is precisely such ambiguities or contradictions that Anneke Eussen gladly evokes with her works – minimalist and expressionist, boy and girl, violence and trust, reconciliation and humiliation, popular culture and fine culture, an artistic signature and remarkably “impersonal” images.

Anneke Eussen, was born in 1978 in the Netherlands, and currently lives and works in Berlin. Eussen has her degree from the Maastricht Academy of Fine Arts and a post-graduate residency at the Hoger Instituut voor Schone Kunsten (Higher Institute for Fine Arts) in Belgium, and has participated in group exhibitions in Europe as well as held solo exhibitions at galleries in Belgium and Germany. The exhibition at Bildmuseet is her first museum exhibition.